Obama Gets a Landslide of Wikipedia Edits

While millions of Americans were out partying or drowning their sorrows during Tuesday night's election returns, plenty of Wikipedia editors were busy updating crucial election-related pages of the free encyclopedia.

Everyone wants to be a part of history.

While millions of Americans were out partying or drowning their sorrows during Tuesday night's election returns, plenty of Wikipedia editors were busy updating crucial election-related pages of the free encyclopedia.

I'll admit that one of the first things I did last night when I got home and turned on my computer was to bring up Barack Obama's Wikipedia page to see if it had been updated. It had, of course.

Plenty of editors were no doubt standing by, hoping to be the first to type in "President-elect Barack Obama" and obtain their piece of Wikipedia history. According to the edit history for Obama's page, the senator's Wikipedia entry received a whopping 348 edits by November 5.

"President-elect" was added to Barack Obama's page at 4:46 UTC Tuesday night, as per projections from CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX News. Two minutes later, a user declared "On November 4, 2008, he was officially declared the 44th President of the United States, narrowly beating Republican nominee John McCain"--a change that was edited a full three minutes later to reflect the fact that Obama has yet to be inaugurated into the position.

Brian Heater has worked at a number of tech pubs, including Engadget, Laptop, and PCMag (where he served as Senior Editor). Most recently, he was as the Managing Editor of TechTimes.com. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.
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